Music is among the most mobile of the arts, equally affecting anywhere and anytime, but many forms are strongly identified with a given place and era. New Orleans means jazz, the Delta has the blues, Detroit will always be equated with the Motown sound, and if credit were given where credit is due, Sedalia, Missouri, would join the above places as the source of another classic African American music—ragtime. The first ragtime tunes, so-called because of their ragged, syncopated rhythms, were played in the early 1890s, but later came into full flower out of the musical mind of Scott Joplin, the universally acclaimed king of ragtime.
Born in 1868 near Texarkana, Texas, to a former slave and freeborn mother, Scott Joplin was one of six children in a musical family. After moving around the Midwest throughout his youth, in the late 1890s Joplin settled in Sedalia, which was then a raucous railroad town, where he studied music theory at Sedalia’s small black college. To pay his way, Joplin played piano at many of the clubs that lined Main Street in Sedalia, which had a reputation both for multiracial harmony and as an adult playground of bars and brothels catering to the many itinerant men passing through. One of these nightclubs gave its name to the “Maple Leaf Rag,” the composition that made Joplin’s reputation and which, at a penny-per-sheet royalty, earned around $500 a year—enough to support him, but far from a fortune. As late as 1940, Life magazine said Sedalia still had one of the “most notorious red-light districts” in the Midwest, but very little remains here today to give a taste of the rowdy, ragtime era. Sedalia remembers its favorite son with a Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival (660/826-2271) every June. There’s also a Scott Joplin mural, downtown at Ohio and 2nd Streets, near the site of the Maple Leaf club.
